Drugs Payment Scheme - inadvertently paying more than €90 p.m.

Correct Clubman......You can claim either one or the other....

If you read the form Med1 carefully , it states that ''you cannot claim tax relief for sums received or due to be received from eg. Health Service Executive
You must give details of such amounts and deduct them from the amount claimed on claim form .''
 
There is alot of talk at the moment about the actual cost of the drugs we are taking and for most people lucky enough to be on the DPS, it is a fact we often do not consider. We as a family are on the DPS and we are interrested in knowing the cost of individual drugs (varies from 4-6 prescriptions per month), however, the chemsit just prints the name of the drugs and the just the combined total owed under the DPS scheme, therefore once the max of e100 is paid the drug cost will show as zero! I have questioned the chemist about a breakdown of the actual cost if we were not using the DPS, but it appears they consider this a complication.
I have a few queries for the forum. Is it standard for DPS customers not to be aware of the actual cost of the Drugs they are prescribed? Could it be possible that drugs are priced differently at the chemsit for a customer on the DPS? Are drugs standard price in every chemsit or is it worth pricing around?
 
The govt agrees a price with the manufacturers.

Let's assume a drug for 100 euro.

There are 3 drug wholesalers.

The Govt agreed to let them have a 17.64% margin.

The Govt pay the pharmacy 117.64 euro.

The pharmacy are paid a dispensing fee of approx 2.50-3.60.

For medical card patients they have no mark-up on the 117.64.

For DPS they mark-up by 50%, so the selling price is 176.46.


Price competition.

At the supplier level = none

At the wholesaler level = none

BUT, the wholesaler do give the pharmacy maybe 8-10% discount, so in fact the pharmacy actually pay maybe 110 for the drug.

At the retail level = none
 
I got a prescription last month from my local chemist and the €90 as reported in this thread is now €100.00 I didn't read or hear anything about this increase!!!!
 
Thank you so much Protocal, that makes perfect sense now. I have ingredient cost from chemist so I have managed to balance exactly and now I will know(info purposes only) exactly what each drug is actually costing each month (over and above what we actually pay on DPS).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top